ROBERT OLEN BUTLER

By: Wendy Wallace

There are two kinds of people who have genuinely pure spirits; children, and the characters found in Robert Olen Butler’s fiction.

Always written in first person, Butler brings to life human forms of tenderness who possess a deep longing for love.  They’re the kind of people whose lives are complex and usually cruelly twisted by fate, but whose souls speak in whispers wanting to be understood and embraced. 

“I’m interested in characters who turn inward and who reach outwards from a position of vulnerability and searching,” said Butler from his home in Lake Charles Louisiana where he teaches and lives with his wife, novelist Elizabeth Dewberry.  “I do have a feeling that these characters have their own will, personality, and intent. They must have a certain element I am conscious of before I proceed into creating a work of art.”

  “Fiction is ultimately the art form of human yearning.  So when a character presents him or herself to my unconscious and I hear their voice and I have a sense of that person, I’m not yet ready to let that character speak until I am intuitively sensing their most fundamental yearning.  It is that you must wait for.”

In his latest novel “The Deep Green Sea”, Butler, a Pulitzer Prize-winning author, seduces his reader into entering a world where his characters’ yearning lures them toward forbidden temptations. Benjamin Cole, a Vietnam veteran seeking resolution and completeness, comes back to the country where seeds from his past were left to linger without him. Le Thi Tien, is a young woman whose present is a constant struggle to find a meaningfulness she can take with her into the future.  Together their lives cross and forever bond in the same way the United States and Vietnam have eternally connected.

“Reality is entirely sensual,” said Butler, who at age 26 went to Vietnam and experienced what he calls “heightened senses caused by the war”. While he was there, he had contact with numerous Vietnamese people from all walks of life and accepted their invitation to immerse himself into their lives and into their culture.  He would come back to America and years later write prose based on this experienced reality.  And he would offer that reality with an elevated sensuality inspiring to stir his readers to their core.

“It’s the artists intention to get back to reality as it exists, which is moment to moment through the senses.  Art takes the sensuality of reality and heightens it further.  There’s a way of knowing, a way of understanding, a way of perceiving important issues in art that is different than any other way of knowing and understanding.”

If Butler’s characters are the epitome of spirits having the most basic human experiences, the sexual aspect of their lives is just as inherent as it is demanding.  Within “The Deep Green Sea” sexuality is a quality Butler weaves into the story. Rather than using it as an accessory, he turns it into something just as essential to life as breathing is. 

“Eroticism comes as a completely natural and inevitable expression of a much deeper yearning; a yearning to define the self and to find and connect with another and then a deeper yearning for wholeness.  With those kinds of yearnings in my characters, sexuality is an absolutely natural and often crucial aspect of their lives.”

Butler’s first ambition was acting.  A desire to act lead him to writing plays in college.  When Butler looks back at his days in theatre he realizes that his need to control emotion was not allotted to him as a playwright, but was gained as a novelist.  In 1969 he joined the military, was taught to speak Vietnamese and sent overseas.  Coming back in 1971 with a wealth of experiences, Butler spent the next ten years as the editor of “Energy User News”, a New York-based publication for energy-conservative corporate readers.  Every day he would ride the Long Island Railroad to and from work, and each day he would write while on the train.  He first four novels were created during the commute.  It’s a work habit he has fiercely held on to.

“I write every day.  It is desperately hard to forge a link to the unconscious and once you get there not to flinch.  But once you get there and you go in there each day it is always scary as hell and it’s demanding, but it is not as difficult if you go every single day.”

In 1981 his first book “The Alleys Of Eden” was published.  An impressive literary career would soon flourish.  Butler would go on to write nine more books including the award-winning “A Good Scent From A Strange Mountain”, also a Vietnam-themed offering,  and “Tabloid Dreams”, both of which have been adapted for the screen.  His works have appeared in “The New Yorker”, “The Paris Review”, “GQ”, and have been included in four editions of “The Best American Short Stories”.  His stories have been translated into a dozen languages and have brought him just as many awards and acclamations.

As a novelist he gives passion to his readers.  As an English professor at McNeese State University in Louisiana, Butler brings his students an appreciation of the writing process.

“The best thing I can give is a consciousness of process; what it is you must do, where in yourself you must go in order to create a work of art, what you must find there, and the courage you must have when you get there.”

In “Deep Green Sea” Robert Olen Butler brings us to a culture that is seemingly as intricate as life itself.  Vietnam is a place of tradition and of people that haunts Butler and compelled him into bringing its world to the page. And in the same powerful way, his characters refuse to leave one’s memory.